Impossible Aerospace US-1 Drone

The US-1 Drone is a all battery and that means it can stay in the air for a whopping 2 hours!

2 Hours of Flight Time

Most drones these days fly for 10-15 minutes with some having an outstanding 20-30 minutes of flight time. For commercial operations, the more time the drone can stay in the air, the more productive it can be. It can cover more ground for search and rescue operations, it can survey more farmland or it can capture that perfect sunset hyperlapse. Impossible Aerospace has found a way to increase that flight time to a staggering 2 hours.

The US based company created the US-1 drone after years of development and it is essentially, a flying battery. They created the airframe using the battery as its primary structure. They aim to compete with fuel powered drones that also offer long flight times, but the simplicity and reliability of electric power is a big draw for companies looking to leverage the latest tech. "The US-1 is more than just a drone. It's the first aircraft designed properly from the ground up to be electric, using existing battery cells without compromise," said Spencer Gore, CEO of Impossible Aerospace.

The US-1 drone will be capable of carrying payloads for different uses such as cameras, thermal sensors and more. Delivery is slated for Q4 of this year with two units currently listed for sale. The US-1 starts at $7500 with options for fast charging and thermal sensors.

I fail to see how their claim of placing a bunch of Li-Ion Cells vertically next to each other offers any sort of structural integrity at all. They haven't built the quad out of the battery, they have only located the batteries on a frame, which has to both carry the weight and the electrical power of the individual cells. This is still an overweight attempt at an endurance quad, and I bet they have not gained anything for energy density with that arrangement vs a conventional quad with (lighter) LiPo cells...

Why post a photo (I know its fake) of a drone flying over a fire...only a little problem

It's a photo from their site. Flying over a fire is not a problem as long as it's done properly, IE. you have authorization to fly there working with the authorities. As this drone is meant for commercial use, that is an actual use case for it. It would not be in the hands of a consumer impeding fire fighting operations.

No. Watts is the product of Voltage and Current. If you don't know the voltage of the pack you can't determine the Ah from Watts. But if it was a 1200Ah battery, that would indeed be 1,200,000mAh.

With that many batteries, I'd assume they're running very high voltage. That may give them some improvement in operating efficiency, particularly if the power level in flight is high.

But it's hard to see how a CF frame with this many batteries hanging from it wouldn't be about as good. So I agree, it doesn't seem all that revolutionary to me. Primarily an exercise in packaging.

Now if they had fabricated a battery in the shape of the frame itself, a single monolithic construct that basically filled every possible nook and cranny with Lithium Polymer, that'd be at least a little groundbreaking (and one hell of a fire hazard). Alas, that'd still mostly be an exercise in packaging though...